How to install Red Hat 9 on ext. USB hard disk?
 

:Pengy: Hi, I'm a relative Linux :newbie:, and I've been looking everywhere for a way to install Red Hat 9 onto my external USB hard drive (yes I know, my BIOS supports USB booting). It shows up as /dev/sda in my other RH comp (the one I've been learning about RH with), and when I boot up using the RH install disk, I can go to the terminal using control-alt-F2 and mount the drive fine, but regardless of what I do, it still only shows hda in the partition setup part. I've tried copying over a RH install from another disk via 'dd if="dev/hda" of="/dev/sda"' or something of the sort, which worked fine. When I boot up, it goes to grub, starts Linux, and eventually gives me a kernel panic (i think it mentioned something about /init, which leads me to believe there is something wrong with mounting the root filesystem or something, or it could just be that the installation was customized for a very different computer). Is there a way to install onto this disk? Can I use kickstart (I couldn't exactly tell what its purpose was)?

I don't think by default Redhat loads a usb driver to support and recognize an external drive during installation.

Not sure about the kernel panic after copying over, I would think its just not supported. Have you tried maybe a different boot loader like lilo instead of grub?

Is there any way to make a custom CD that does? Oddly, when the install begins, it says something about loading USB drivers however.

I'm running the 2.6.4 kernel btw, so I was hoping that that would support booting off USB, esp. since it was already in Linux.

Good suggestion, I'll try that and let you know how it works. I was wondering if the bootloader has anything to do with stuff beyond just loading up the kernel, what else does it do?

Another question, can I use a floppy boot disk to boot up the system? Can I use the built-in RH one or must I creat/find a specialized one?